


apotheosis

by nestorius



Category: Metalocalypse (Cartoon)
Genre: Animal Death, Breathplay, Canon-Typical Violence, Choking, Drug Use, Hot Tub Sex, M/M, Post-Episode: s04 The Doomstar Requiem, look i dont know what the fuck either
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:07:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24138589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nestorius/pseuds/nestorius
Summary: Toki's acting weird.
Relationships: Pickles the Drummer/Toki Wartooth
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	apotheosis

Pickles sits up gasping. Clock on his bedside table says it's way too early, _way,_ like not even afternoon. He claws at his throat, thinking for a second that the crushing feeling up in his windpipe is him choking to death on his puke (that's happened before, almost) but it's not in his - it's not in his _body,_ the feeling? He feels like he's being strangled to death but it's not in his _body._ He leans against the headboard and takes stock of himself. He ain't hungover, which means the shakes should be kicking in any second, but they. Don't. They're not kicking in. He shudders from something else. There's wisps of a dream floating around in his head: something about sunlight, about wine. Not Whoresblood Wine. God, that fucking disaster. No. Dream him had good wine. He could go for some wine. He ferrets around in the nest of bottles surrounding his bed and comes up empty. Fuck. Kitchen it is.

Pickles stumbles out of his room and finds a bunny in the middle of the hallway, reflected a dozen times in suits of armor. It’s huge, bigger than he thought bunnies could be (not that he thinks about bunnies that much.) It’s brown with a white saddle and has big glinting eyes. Its nose twitches when he kneels.

“Feck are you doing here,” Pickles says to it. He pokes at its ears.

It sniffs at him, and then it thumps down the hall.

Pickles climbs to his feet and follows.

They end up at Toki’s room. No real surprise there. The door’s open. Pickles peeks in. Toki’s on the floor, cross-legged, cradling another bunny, this one white and red-eyed. There are other bunnies clustered around a plastic box filled to the brim with carrots. The crunching sounds like an amp plugged in and left to sit. They freeze when Pickles sidles in, their big wet eyes glittering, and then they relax and get back to pulling carrots out of the box. The big rabbit thumps its way over to Toki and sniffs at him. Toki has a bottle of vodka propped up against his thigh and he’s humming, tuneless, half-voiced, as he threads his fingers through the white bunny’s fur. Sounds good with the crunchy amp fuzz, actually. Dark ambient. Genre-wise, not his thing, but technically not bad.

“Toki?”

The white bunny spooks and hops out of Toki’s lap.

Pickles eyes it suspiciously. “What’s with, uh, what’s with the bunnies?”

Toki picks up the white-saddled brown rabbit and holds it up. Its feet drum against Toki’s belly and he shifts to rub his nose in the scruff of its neck. “They's for an experiments."

"An experiment?"

"I discosvereds a things.”

“What?”

“Looks,” Toki says. “Look what I cans does.” He squinches his face up.

The rabbit blinks. Then it stops kicking. It lolls in Toki’s arms. Toki readjusts, picks it up by the scruff of its neck. He swings it back and forth.

Pickles blinks. “You, what, put it to sleep?”

Toki drops the rabbit on the floor. It doesn’t bounce, not exactly, but it thumps in the same heavy way as a Klokateer. Flops over on its side. Its tongue comes out of its mouth and there’s a little red leaking out of its nose.

Pickles, stunned, toes it. As if he needs to check. Yeah. Yeah, that’s –

“Looks at me,” Toki says, a little raspy, and his eyes cross.

Look. Pickles has seen some shit. Pickles has done some shit. Toki isn’t doing shit, he’s just sitting there next to a dead rabbit the size of a beagle with his eyes crossed and a bottle of vodka tipped onto his lap, leaking a little onto his jeans. If he thinks about it, this is the least bad thing Pickles has seen in Toki’s room. Top ten least bad. Top five. There is a reflex tattooed in Pickles’ hindbrain that tastes like being thirteen in his bedroom in Tomahawk just after the front door slams. The reflex forms itself in words when it comes, kick-twitch like the bunny, and it says CHARLES SHOULDN’T SEE THIS.

Pickles kicks his heel back at the door and it clicks shut.

The bunny jerks.

Toki’s eyes roll back in his head.

The bunny shivers and rolls onto its belly. It shakes itself out like Skwisgaar after the shower and creeps its way over to the box of carrots. Toki knee-walks over two steps and picks up a black rabbit, sleek and surprised. He catches the vodka bottle before it tips, sits back heavily on his haunches.

Pickles is sweating. Charles can’t see this. _Can’t._ Charles hasn’t – they haven’t seen Charles. Abigail is here now, in what used to be his office. Abigail – he –

“There’s ams a switch,” Toki says. The bunny squirms in his arms. “I hits the switch – ”

The bunny flops.

“And I hits it again.”

The bunny brightens and kicks.

“Okay,” Pickles says. “Uh, cool?”

“But with them’s ones,” Toki says, and jabs his thumb towards the corner, “I can’t hits the switch.”

Pickles follows his thumb and sees a stack of dead rabbits in the corner, tucked next. Their skulls have been stove in. Their spines are twisted at angles that make Pickles’ back hurt. Blood on their mouths, little pink tongues flopped over their shattered teeth. He’s seen Klokateers in worse shape, in bigger piles, but that reflex is clanging against his ribcage hard enough to crack and if Charles finds him in here – 

“I tries,” Toki says, “but they doesn’t wakes up _right_.”

The pile moves. A rabbit oozes its way out onto the rug. Its skull has been smashed at an angle, carving away from the center, so its ear is dangling on a piece of bone. Its one dead eye turns to Pickles and it bares its teeth in silent hiss. It wheezes and when it does blood comes out of its mouth. It trembles, then goes still.

"I can'ts fixes them," Toki says. “They feels different.”

“Uh,” Pickles says.

Toki takes a swig of vodka. There’s fur matted to the bottom of the bottle.

“Okay.” Pickles cracks his knuckles. Vodka sounds good right about now. Vodka and wine. Mixed. Yes. “Well. 'm gonna go."

“You don’ts wants to stays and pet the bunnies?” Toki picks the black rabbit up under its arms and hold it out. The rabbit squirms.

“’m – good, thanks,” Pickles says.

"Stays with me."

And that's a command. Toki's eyes are narrow and weird and there's a vein bulging in his neck, and Pickles can feel something pushy and dark as the Tomahawk doorslam leaking out of him. 

"I wants youse to stay here," Toki says. The rabbit squeaks as he digs his fingers into the back of its neck. "I don'ts wants to be alones again. You stay."

Pickles can _feel_ him. Sticky. Vodka in his mouth. This cloud made of anger and distilled potatoes. He drops in the cloud and swims around, feeling for purchase. Toki's staring at him and the bunny is thrashing, twisting. Pickles' body outpaces his mind as the feeling settles around his larynx: choking to death on your own puke. Well, he knows how to deal with that. He stretches his neck up real far and tells the nonexistent puke curdling around his esophagus to go south. Toki’s real pissed off, vein in his neck twitching. His mouth twitches too, like he’s about to say something and Pickles takes a big breath and sucks up the cloud he's swimming around in and says "Toki, dude, calm down.”

He bites down on the taste building up behind his teeth and collects his spit in one side of his mouth so he won’t puke. That’s in his head. _Don’t puke, don’t puke, stay in the moment, stay party -_

And suddenly it’s gone. Toki's grip on the rabbit relaxes and it darts under his bed. Pickles stands there, panting, massaging his neck. Toki's looking straight ahead, drunk to the point of his eyes crossing, dozy kind of calm. Pickles takes another deep breath and wipes the back of his hand on his mouth.

"Good talk, Toki," he says, and he leaves Toki blank-eyed in the room with the hum of the amplifier rabbits drowning out the thud of his heart in his ears.

//

Okay, Toki's been weird since, uh. Since. You know, they haven't talked about it. They haven't talked about the entire thing. What's there to talk about, you know? Abigail's here, running a tight ship, or at least Pickles guesses she's running a tight ship 'cause no one's died yet, or died more than usual in the case of Klokateers and, he guesses, bunny rabbits. They gotta go play a few shows or whatever but, like, the album's done, and Toki's back, and their contract - is - Pickles isn't sure about the contract, just how he's not sure about Abigail and Charles. How Nate's doing. They're all kind of avoiding each other. Empty hot tub. They're brothers or whatever but - that makes it worse, you know? The rest of them, they're only children (though God knows how that's possible given, uh, Skwisgaar's mom's - nice lady, but you know, her whole deal), they don't _get it_ , how a brother is a thorn dug under your thumbnail, a wire in your brain that makes your legs twitch even if you don't want 'em to twitch, it's like licking an ashtray, like digging your nails into your face and ripping straight down 'cause if you did that to him you'd get _in trouble._ This is, Pickles guesses, what he does to his brother. Avoiding him. Yeah. Staying out of - staying out of his way. He's the brother expert, that's what you're supposed to do with brothers, and they're brothers now, so - 

Toki's been weird, is his point. Yes. But there's Toki being _weird_ and Toki being - shit, that was straight vodka. At, like, noon. 

Pickles paces in the kitchen, twisting and untwisting the cap off a bottle of pinot grigio (he hates corks so the Klokateers rebottle everything for him). The lid on the Doritos dispenser is loose and he jimmies that off to take a couple of handfuls.

The door clangs open and Nathan oozes in. Oozes is the wrong word but he’s not moving sharp enough to be stomping. He clatters around the cupboards, muttering. Pickles presses himself to the side of the table and jams a Dorito in his mouth.

Nate's dripping, same way Toki was leaking, but Pickles can see it now, like, for real, black and foul, hissing when it hits the kitchen floor. His mouth tastes weird, suddenly, it’s tingling like he’s rubbed cocaine on his gums and the way back of his nose is burning the same way.

"Hey, Nate?"

Nathan grunts. The black stuff congeals on the floor. Pickles can taste it - beer, migraine, pot to kill the migraine that just made it worse, long shadow of coke dragging him down. Reeks.

“Nate?”

“What?”

 _You’re dripping_ dries up in Pickles’ throat. He jabs out a hand. “Want some Doritos?”

Nathan stares at him from under a curtain of black hair and he’s the kind of quiet-pissed that can only come from a coke comedown. Pickles dives into that, dives into the feeling, the buzz on his lips, and he - 

Something happens. Pickles ain't sure what. It's like he's taking a big handful of Peruvian marching powder and throwing it to the wind. Like he's in a cloud and batting it apart with his hands. Like he sees the outline of the shadow of where the coke was and is drawing it up from memory. Muscle memory. Plant it in Nate. He coughs.

Nathan’s pupils dilate and he licks his teeth, tongue bulging under his lips.

“Yeah, sure,” Nathan says, and he jags Pickles’ hand a little, and when he crunches there’s a little more slam to how his teeth connect. “Hey, Pickles, I was thinking – ”

“Yeah?”

“I was thinking last night,” and Nathan screws up his eyes. “You wanna – you wanna go out – you wanna hunt some – I feel like hunting. Haven’t gone hunting in forever.”

“Yeah?”

“Something big. You know? Something fuckin’ brutal. Uh. Like. Like some _water buffalo._ You know?”

And Pickles stands there watching Nathan eat chips from his hand and babble and there’s still the black stuff on the floor but it’s dissolving. He drinks his wine, not tasting it. He want to ask _what the hell_ to the air but if he does then someone’s gonna hear and then Charles – Charles knows everything. Charles shouldn’t know about this.

//

It’s like _that._ Like _that._ You know? All of a sudden, handclap, smack on the kit, _bam,_ it’s there. He can feel it. He can see it. Mordhaus is fucking filthy with it. Whatever it is. There’s a lot of it. It’s smeared on the walls. It’s dripping. Murderface on cheap bourbon: that’s the color of baby shit and gets greener when he’s in a mood. Skwisgaar’s doing a lot of speed lately, in that cranky familiar way you do when you’re trying to write a fucking song. Abigail, coffee and tall cool bottles filled with icewater and mint leaves; she leaves behind a clear trail that Pickles can’t sink his teeth into. Pickles can stick his fingers into everything else, though, and they’re leaving splotches everywhere. Skwisgaar’s is piss yellow and sharp but it stays on the walls like a scab forming and then it dries clear. Pickles gets that. You need to be pissed sometimes. And Nate’s comes and goes, dark cloud, throbbing. Mostly it’s collected low around his body and it’s like Skiwsgaar’s speed-trails but sometimes – Nate’s doing a fuckton of coke lately, which ain’t like him. Nate’s a downers guy. And Pickles discovers that if he drags his tongue across his teeth in the right way the tingly feeling from Nate’s coke stays in his mouth and the high is over but the black-tar stickiness stops forming on the floor.

Yeah. He can see all of that.

He sees it better after the dreams.

The dreams come every night and they’re – he keeps waking up choking but after the initial spit’n’cough that ain’t no thing to worry about. He gets better snatches of them now. Bright blue clear sky. River. Not like the Tomahawk River with the broken dock and the empty cans merrily floating by but a _real_ river. With trees and shit. People screaming but, like, fan screaming. Someone sitting next to him. Wine in his mouth. Good wine.

Pickles keeps finding dead bunnies in the corners. He can tell they’re dead even though they’re walking around. Sometimes they have dents in their skulls. Sometimes they’re dripping brain on the floor. The big white one with the brown saddle, he sees that hopping around all the time. Toki’s smeared himself all over them, a bright shiny red that’s nevertheless dark as the outside of Mordhaus. Toki will be there in the kitchen or in the hot tub, sober, and that’s okay. Pickles skips out of the room every time he feels Toki’s seething cloud filling the back of his mouth. Skips out and books it to the wine cellar. He’s been drinking a lot of wine lately, good and not. That’s got flavor. Drowns out the aseptic taste of vodka.

They still haven’t talked. Not all of them. Not together. Pickles hasn’t talked to anyone. He’s pretty sure no one’s talked to anyone else.

Skwisgaar wings his guitar at the wall when Pickles is on the arcade machine and Toki’s in the hot tub humming to himself and it clangs against the wall. “Dildos fucking tones,” he says, and he storms off. He leaves a trail.

Toki flicks at his hair, where the piss-yellow stuff has dropped, and he makes a face. Pickles catches him making a face. Pickles stares at him.

“Gross,” Toki says, and then he dips his head under the water and blows bubbles.

Pickles keeps staring til the arcade machine clangs, tugging him back. He’s lost a life.

//

Brothers stay apart. Yeah. Better for them. Seth in Australia. Amber too. Pickles feels bad for Amber sometimes; she’s got great tits, she could do better. She’s stupid as he is if she can’t see she can do better. Shouldn’t feel bad for stupid people. Brothers stay apart. Brothers come together at family reunions and hope to fucking God that no one comments on the white under your nose after the trips to the bathroom. 

Right now they’re jammed in a backstage so full of rider food that it’s hard to move around. Murderface is eating his way slowly and noisily through all the shrimp cocktail. Nathan comes out of the bathroom swiping at his face and sucking at his teeth: just a hit, just a little spit-shine on the energy he’s got. Normal. Pickles takes a slug out his wine bottle and cracks his knuckles. He’s feeling good. Good as you can before a show. He thinks. He's a little nervous. About what, who knows.

“Boys,” Abigail says, sliding out of the bathroom. “We need to talk.”

Abigail’s pissed at them for not rehearsing – this is a comeback gig, it needs to be good. Abigail’s real pissed, pissed in a way she shouldn’t be, jittery fingers. Pickles’ lips tingle when he looks at her. Abigail spent last night with Nathan and Pickles knows that because he knows for a fact Nathan gets whiskey dick and he wasn’t hungover this morning, or not hungover enough for Pickles to kick at the sludge congealing on the floor. Abigail did a line with Nathan in the bathroom just now, he thinks, and both those facts body-check him but hard. He gnaws on his wrist.

“Have a good show,” she finishes, and she disappears. Nathan scrambles after her. Murderface jams a handful of shrimp into his pockets and hobbles after them, grinning. Ain’t no party like two people fighting on coke.

“ _I_ has been rehearsing,” Skwisgaar mutters to no one. He’s suddenly sludged with yellow.

Toki is staring at Pickles. He’s nibbling on an Oreo and he has a bunny on his lap. Christ alive _what is the deal with the fucking bunnies?_ It’s Toki and Toki has bunnies and kitty cats and Make-A-Wish kids and no one’s noticing that this fucking bunny has a goddamn eye missing? No, they don’t, ‘cause no one’s talking to Toki, no one’s looking at Toki, no one's looking at each other, Pickles is trying his best not to look at Toki, but Toki is looking _real hard_ at Pickles.

“Im’s goings to tell that stupids skanks I’se been rehearsing,” Skwisgaar grumbles, and he pushes himself out of his chair and trails disconsolately after Nathan and Abigail and Murderface. The irritation and the speed slough off him in great long sticky trails. It sits on the floor, quivering slightly.

Toki crunches the Oreo in half. Swallows. The rabbit vibrates. “You can sees it.”

Pickles says, “Uh.”

“I know you cans. It’s dilskostings,” Toki says. “He leave enough hairs in the showers drains. Don’ts need snots on the floor.”

A long silence.

“You lefts me alone,” Toki says.

Pickles stutters. The inside of his nose tickles and yep, that’s a nosebleed, and it’s trickling down the back of his throat and holy fuck there’s the puke-choke feeling again but it feels _real,_ feels like a rope around his neck. Toki’s eyes are boring into him. Toki’s been drinking straight vodka all day and he’s drunk and he’s ornery and Pickles dives into the cloud of alcohol and feels around for what you’re supposed to feel when you’re drinking vodka, the nothingness, the _oblivion,_ and he digs his hands in and takes two big fistfuls and suddenly the rope around his neck disappears and it’s just him and Toki and a bunny and a long path of yellow slime heading out the door.

“Stops it,” Toki whispers. He’s lolling in the chair, eyes unfocused.

Pickles hauls over, panting. He rubs his neck. “What the feck, Toki?”

Toki doesn’t move. “I turn offs youse switch if you does that again.”

“Then don’t try to fecking kill me!”

“Stops leavings me alone!”

Pickles’ mouth drops open and he’s suddenly furious, God he is furious, he’s furious like Seth is draped over his shoulder saying _I know your PIN_ and Mom’s complaining to Mrs. Drebble from next door that Pickles is making an awful _racket._ “We came back for you!”

“ _Not soons enough_ ” and Pickles can see the rope coming, like a snake, and he slams headfirst into the cloud of alcohol in Toki’s brain, and there’s an eternal moment of confusion and the sick taste of vodka puke coming all the way up into his sinuses and they both end up on the floor, wet with Skwisgaar’s secretions, coughing. The rabbit is somehow in Toki’s chair, unbothered.

“Stops goings in my head.”

“Stop strangling me!”

“I wants to be in a bads mood,” Toki shouts, clambering to his feet, “and I wants it to be on somethings that isn’t _bunnies!_ ”

Pickles wipes his sticky hands on his shirt. “Where are you even getting the goddamn bunnies?”

“You doesn’t know?” Toki plops the rabbit on his lap into Skwisgaar’s gummed-up chair. “They’s from _his_ room. I finds them comes out of his room. Ask _Skwisgaar_ and all he sluts, _where’s the bunnies from._ ”

“Skwisgaar?”

“Every time he has a new sluts, there’s more bunnies. You doesn’t notice because he gets freaked out. He _makes them._ He stops taking the sluts.” Toki sighs. “I takes the bunnies but he doesn’t asks about them.”

“Is he, like…”

“I haves no ideas whats Skiwsgaars ams doings, because no ones talks to me, because youse all fucking _embarrassed_ you didn’t comes for me.”

“I’m not embarrassed!”

Toki rips off his shirt. Pickles expected to be strangled again, not that, and he has no idea what to do with that. The scar on Toki’s back is leathery and raised above the other scars, a huge gulf in the skin knitted back together only barely by flesh still a bright and angry pink. That’s where the red is coming from, staining the clear cloud of the vodka.

“You should be,” Toki says bitterly, and he picks up the rabbit and tucks it under his arm. The bathroom door clicks behind him.

//

Show happens. Pickles is _pissed._ Fucking _pissed._ The drums talk to him. The crowd screams as the pyrotechnics do their work. Pickles can barely hear them. Music roiling through him. His music. Music he made. He writes all the fucking music. Him and Nate. Him and Skwis. Fuck Toki. His teeth clack together on the beat and it’s not til the last note fades on the song before intermission that he figures out his mouth really hurts. He examines himself in the mirror and there’s blood on his gums. Know what, fuck it, if he’s already grinding his teeth into smithereens – He pours a gram of MDMA into his hand and swallows it down, and then twenty seconds later he pukes all over the fucking sink ‘cause he’s been knocking back wine in a water bottle the whole show and the serotonin in his belly don’t want to jam with the alcohol. Fuck this. Fuck it. Nathan and Murderface and Skwisgaar are gonna spend the aftershow bothering groupies, or in Nathan’s case pressuring Abigail to – you know what? Pickles is a fucking dick but he’s never _pressured_ anyone to take drugs, _okay,_ when he was getting back with Snakes’n’Barrels he respected their fucking _choices_ , okay? Dumb fucking choice to be sober but he _respected_ it. Nate’s a bad fucking influence and Abigail – she’s an idiot, she’s stupid just like Amber is, doesn’t know she could do better, just because she’s smart enough to go for a person better than Pickles ain’t mean she’s smart enough to figure out Nathan’s a, a, a fat, stupid – Nathan _sucks._ Fuck Nathan. Actually, you know what, going for someone better than Pickles doesn’t mean _shit_ because Pickles –

He sits in the bathroom, letting the puke steam, and he’s late sliding back into his kit. Sea of fans in front of him. He can feel them leaking. He can see them. All colors of the rainbow. Screaming and howling. Oh yes. God he hates them. He hates all of them. He hates what they’ve let him do to himself. He can feel them seething.

Toki looks back at him. Their eyes lock.

And Pickles reaches into the high of the crowd and he’s on a riverbank drinking wine from a crystal goblet and hearing screams and seeing flesh fly in the air and there’s blood spattering his face and he’s totally fine with it ‘cause it’s for _him_ and he kicks the drums and one of the rockets for the pyrotechnics misses its cue and knocks into another and the explosion streaks through the crowd in a red-hot burst of primal fury leaving limbs and blood and lymph in its wake and Nathan’s too show-drunk to notice and Murderface doesn’t care and Skwisgaar’s too busy proving himself to Abigail to give a damn and they’re all still high even as their limbs are torn from their bodies and the roar of what that means thrums in Pickles’ heart and he screams so loud that the paint around his mouth splits and flakes and when Toki looks back again midsong he’s smiling. They’re both smiling.

//

Mordhaus is quiet except for the hum of the security systems and the soft sound of Nathan’s fish tanks blubbing. There are bunnies, dead and alive and undead, hopping around, gnawing on the carpet, making a pretty fucking good dark ambient album. Pickles isn’t sure where everyone else is. Not here. Some club. Whatever. He’s in the hot tub with Toki.

“You don’t get it,” he slurs. “You don’t talk to your brothers. That’s not what they’re for.”

“Youse talking to me.”

“Maybe we’re not brothers.”

“What is we?”

“Bandmates.” One eye rolls up in its socket against his will. Pickles slumps. “But, like, _stronger,_ uh, bonded bandmates. I don’t fucking know.”

Toki considers. Pickles is very drunk. Good drunk. Hazy drunk. Toki’s drunk too. Pickles made him have some wine. Pickles found a bag of E tabs forgotten under his bed and they’re starting to kick now. He shouldn’t take MDMA straight. These settle better in the stomach. Fade. Room’s swimming. Toki’s swimming. They’re both swimming. Heh. In the hot tub. _Oh,_ the roll hit. Pickles burbles and his bones melt in the water. Limp like a fuckin dead bunny.

“I thinks theres is different valtrietieties of brothers,” Toki says.

“Mmbrhgbe,” Pickles says.

Toki’s jaw is working. The good kind. Toothgrind. Yeah. Pickles puts his hand on Toki’s face. Toki’s not leaking so much as he is flowing, pink and soft. It pools in the water. It shimmers.

“You can’t be my brother ‘cause I don’t want you to die,” Pickles says.

"If I hads a brother I wouldnt's wants him to die," Toki says. "I kinds of want you to die."

"Aw, man."

"Only kinds of," Toki says. "I'd bringeds you back."

"Like the bunnies?"

"Like the bunnies," Toki agrees.

"So we aren't brothers," Pickles says. "We're bunnies."

Toki seems satisfied by that. “When I flips the switch, whats does it feel like?”

“Gettin’ choked.”

Toki puts his hands around Pickles’ neck. “Like this?”

“ _Hhhhhoboy_ ,” Pickles says.

“What?”

“Do that again.”

Toki cocks his head. He sits back. His eyes narrow.

“Do it,” Pickles gurgles, “again.”

Toki shoves him under the water to strangle. Pickles jams both fists through the sparkly pink water into the sparkly pink cloud in Toki’s brain. Feels good to be in there. They emerge gasping. Pickles hauls out over the side of the tub, giggling.

“You didn’t comes backs soons enough,” Toki says softly.

“Yeah,” Pickles says. “Sorry. We’re assholes.”

Pickles chokes. Toki is smiling. The invisible rope slackens. Pickles heaves back in the shimmery pink water. Toki has his tongue between his teeth. "You likes that?"

"Yeah."

Toki straddles him. Pickles knows what this is and he's high enough to be delighted. Charles knows about that. Knew. Where the fuck is Charles? Charles knew how to ambush the people coming out of their bedrooms with NDAs and he was real careful to get those NDAs on the guys Pickles takes back, more careful even than he was with the women creeping out of Skwisgaar's room. Didn't happen very often and he's pretty sure only Nathan knew about it. Nathan learned not to tease him about it, same as the world figured out you can't call Nathan Tonto. Pickles puts his hands on Toki's face and peels up Toki's lip to lick his gumline. Toki huffs as the coke hits. Toki gets mean on coke. Toki claws down Pickles' chest hard as he can.

"Thassgoodshit," Pickles burbles.

"Don't leaves me agains," Toki says.

"Bunny," Pickles says, for no reason.

Toki settles into Pickles' lap. His hips twist. Pickles can feel his erection poking through his swim trunks, against Pickles' belly. Pickles has seen Toki naked before and he can kind of extrapolate from there. Toki's too high, too drunk, to be real hard. Pickles, once Toki's hands wrap around his larynx, finds he isn't having that problem.

//

Riverbed. Sun above. Wine. Purple robe. Grape leaf crown. Temple. White columns. Fancy bullshit. There are naked chicks in front of him ripping each other apart. The blood-spray hits his face and he wipes it off. Toki takes his hand and licks it. “Hey, Toki?”

“Yes, Pickle?”

“Why the feck are they doing that?”

“We makes them,” Toki says. "By our preskense."

“Why?”

Toki shrugs. “They’s maniacs.”

"What are we?"

Toki shrugs again. He has a rabbit on his lap. It's gnawing on the scythe he also has across his lap. "I dunno."

The river breaches and there's Nathan, blue and tusked and finned and looking confused as can be. He makes a big grunt hippopotamus noise and disappears back under the water.

Pickles blinks. "Feck was that?"

"Fish Nathans," Toki says. "Can I haves some wines?"

And Pickles hands him the crystal goblet, and they drink until the dream ends, and Pickles wakes up in his bed with his swim trunks itching and dried to his skin and Toki wrapped like a rope around him. Not brothers, he decides, and he's relieved. He'll let Charles know about this. At some point. Yeah.

**Author's Note:**

> "toki turns into a literal god of death and sex chokes pickles, who is dionysus and can control people's moods via their drug intake" is an idea i had in 2015 but did not fully develop til today due to reasons. the naked chicks are maenads doing a sparagmos


End file.
